Unfinished essays and spontaneous eruptions on radical politics and popular culture

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

On "stealing" political labels

All of our recent talk about political labeling here in the Libertarian Left blogosphere has been polite and very well-mannered, even with a few philosophical and tactical differences. But I’m reminded of some not-so-civil conversation I incited online a couple of years ago. I’d written an article for Strike-The-Root.com about building a Left coalition between “market anarchists” and “socialist anarchists.” (In the sidebar, you can find links to that article and its sequel in the STR archive under “More Conger Polemics.”) Someone later posted my piece on Infoshop.org, a socialist anarchist website, where it elicited 47 pages of online give-and-take, most of it from livid leftists. One of my favorite angry posts characterized radical Rothbardians like myself this way:

“… their desire is to co-opt and rip off any useful ideas or tactics anarchists or the left might have. They are not friends, they are enemies. They are trying to steal our labels: libertarian, anarchist, leftist, anti-state. They are scum.”

Granted, we market anarchists often whine that social democrats long ago hijacked the Left from us, and corresponding labels like liberal and progressive. But imagine —anti-property anarchists bitching about “label theft.”